The present invention generally relates to the field of telecommunications and to systems and methods for managing telephony-based services. More particularly, the present invention relates to a voice messaging system that calls a called party to play a previously stored message.
Today, due to busy life and work environment, it is often difficult to reach a person on their telephone and many people still do not have answering machines or subscribe to voice messaging systems. Many people have several telephone numbers, including a wireless phone, an office phone, and a home phone. While there are enhanced features available for a called party to forward calls between phones, many people do not regularly forward their telephone calls. Also, many times a wireless phone is unavailable for various reasons. For example, many people only turn on their wireless telephone when they are away from their wire line phone. Also, wireless telephones, because of their battery limitations and other factors including convenience, are turned on and off by the wireless user. Furthermore, a wireless user may be unavailable because the wireless telephone is outside of the service range of their wireless telephone provider. Therefore, people are often unavailable by phone and if a called party does not have an answering machine or does not subscribe to a voice messaging service, it becomes difficult to leave a message.
Also, answering machines may fail and be unavailable to store messages. Further, most answering machines are not capable of receiving a call and recording a message if the telephone line is already in use. Additionally, there are many times when it may take many telephone calls to several different numbers to find the called party, when it would be desirable to just leave a message.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for systems and methods that overcome the limitations and drawbacks of conventional systems by allowing a calling party to leave a message for a called party, in the aforementioned circumstances.
The present invention is directed to systems and methods for a calling party to leave a message on a voice messaging system, and the messaging system to dial the called party to play the message at a later time. Preferably, the invention is implemented on an Advanced Intelligent Network (AIN) version of a wire line telephone system.
According to aspects of the invention, a subscriber (i.e., the calling party) is prompted for, and an associated system subsequently receives, message options including reviewing the message, deleting the message, re-recording the message, and/or sending the message. Preferably, the prompt is audible voice notification. Preferably, the system receives message options through either telephone keypad entry or through voice recognition and processing techniques.
According to further aspects of the invention, a subscriber is prompted for, and the system receives, delivery options including a frequency of how often to dial the called party, a maximum time or number of tries to dial the called party, a specific time to dial the called party, a time to begin regular calls to the called party, and/or a telephone number to call the called party. Alternatively, the system may prompt the user for a priority level (e.g., high priority, low priority) and the system may accordingly determine how often and how long to dial the called party.
According to other aspects of the invention, a subscriber list is provided including a list of subscribers.
The above-listed features of the present invention will be more fully set forth hereinafter.